Weekly Recap
News of our major expansion that’s ramping up made the Cape
Cod Times, CapeCod.com,
and the Cape
Cod Chronicle. The team at Lowell Instruments has been cranking away
on prepping and shipping gear for a slew of installs later this month.
We’ve got a lot of time on the docks coming up in the near future, and
are looking forward to seeing many of you in the coming weeks.
Of all the fisheries we work with, the offshore lobster fishery
continues to present some of the more challenging conditions for our
systems. The combination of long soak times, relatively quick processing
of gear on deck, deep sets, long trips, and all of the steel panels on
these vessels present challenges for the loggers, wireless
communications, tech support and data processing. Thanks to the captains
and crews of the F/V Virginia Marie and F/V Gladys Elaine as we work to
iron out issues with your systems. Huanxin is aboard the F/V Virginia
Marie as I write this, rigging up a new bluetooth extension antenna.
With patience and perseverance, we’ll get things working.
Thanks also to Captain Joe on the F/V Ryan Joseph for reaching out
about an interesting observation from one of his dissolved oxygen and
temperature sensors deployed north of the Boston Harbor inbound lane on
Stellwagen Bank. Last week, he noticed an increase in temperature and
dissolved oxygen. Coincidentally, another fishing vessel participating
in the Outer Cape Coastal Current Research Fleet (a collaboration
between WHOI, Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation, and the Cape Cod
Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance) collected a temperature and salinity
profile a few miles southeast around that time, showing surface
temperature similar to the observations from Joe’s gear. Also around the
same time, National Data Buoy Center Buoy 44013 (Boston Approach Lighted
Buoy) recorded a shift in wind speed and direction to where the wind was
blowing ~25 knots out of the Southeast. Looking at these observations,
it seems the spikes in Joe’s data resulted from wind driven mixing,
pushing warmer surface water down to the bottom. Thanks to Linus from
CFRF and Glen from WHOI for helping put the pieces together!

Figure 1 – Picture of the Lowell DDH screen aboard the F/V Ryan
Joseph showing a noticeable increase in temperature (red) and dissolved
oxygen (blue) late on October 29th.
As mentioned last week, a remnant Gulf Stream ring is affecting shelf
edge conditions. As depicted by one of the green worms in the animation
below, it took one of the drifters (prepared by CSCR & Scituate High
School students) for a wild ride. You can also see one of Cassie’s
miniboats (red worm) enter the scene on Halloween morning and eMOLT
bottom temps (white #s) pop up here and there.
